COLLECTED FICTIONS

By Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Andrew Hurley Viking; 565 pages; $40 In 1962, a year after the blind librarian Jorge Luis Borges shared the Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, the first translations of his incomparable fictions made their sly appearance, forever altering the landscape of the English-language short story.

For most North American readers, "Ficciones" proved an initial exposure to the "magic realism" practiced so adroitly by our neighbors to the south. Coming across a tale such as "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" for the first time was like taking a walk on the moon.

On the approach of his centennial next year, the publication of "Collected Fictions," Borges' complete fictional oeuvre in a single volume of crisp new translations by Andrew Hurley, is an event worthy of celebration. The first of three planned volumes from Viking, (the other two will gather the great Argentine's poetry and nonfiction), this long-awaited collection possesses an intrinsic value far in excess of its all-in-one, Swiss-Army-knife utility.

In his foreword to "Ficciones," Borges, who died in 1986, called the composition of vast books "a laborious madness." It is far better, he suggested, to make believe such works "already exist" and then offer the reader a precis of the imaginary book, summarizing and commenting on a hypothetical text.

In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," the chimerical book in question is "a vast and systematic fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet, its architectures and its playing cards, the horror of its mythologies and the murmur of its tongues, its emperors and its seas, its minerals and its birds and fishes, its algebra and its fire."

The subtlety and skill by which Borges leads a reader to accept the existence of this fantastic book is no small measure of his genius. Weaving together imaginary anecdote and actual friends, he creates the illusion of a literary essay, detailing through hints, digressions and mock footnotes the path that led him to the discovery of this parallel world, Tlon. With deft economy the reader is shown glimpses of Tlonian geometry and philosophy and is introduced to the concept of the hronir, the duplication of a lost object through the force of pure expectation.

Borges then reveals that this vast 40-volume encyclopedia of an illusory planet was, in fact, created by a secret society funded in the 1820s by a wealthy American slave-owner, who wished to celebrate his atheism by proving that "mortals could conceive and shape a world."

Borges goes on to relate the first intrusions of objects from Tlon into the reality of our own world: a fantastic compass and a small, shining metal cone of incredible weight, "an image of the deity in certain Tlonian religions."

The author brings us full circle, from a fantastic book about an imaginary world to the notion that a "fictitious past has supplanted in men's memories that other past, of which we now know nothing certain -- not even that it is false." Borges thus provides an apt, witty metaphor for our uncertain age.

The cumulative delights gained from immersing oneself in the work of a great master far outweigh the pleasure of doling the pieces out sparingly, like bonbons. Revisiting Borges and becoming reacquainted with his mythic themes -- the mask, the dagger, the mirror, the maze -- reinforces one's understanding of the author's enduring dictum: "Literature is but guided dreaming."

"Collected Fictions" opens with the story "A Universal History of Iniquity," Borges fictional debut in 1935, a landmark of Spanish prose literature acclaimed as the first example of magic realism. A reunion with this rogue's gallery of thugs, outlaws and Chinese lady pirates feels like swaggering back into the shadows of some disreputable and dangerous saloon.

Although his "hoaxes and pseudo-essays," as Borges referred to these stories, are now famously familiar, a vague unease accompanied a recent rereading. An earlier edition of the lead story, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovani in collaboration with Borges, has the title as "A Universal History of Infamy." Why the discrepancy? Surely the difference between "infamy" and "iniquity" matters. The original Spanish title is "Historia universal de la infamia."

What occasioned Andrew Hurley's strange choice? He certainly knows the Spanish word "iniquidad." Those preferring the sound and sense of "infamy" might resolve to read the stories again in both translations.

The differences they would find are slight but many. Hurley perfectly captures Borges' hieratic style (a convoluted clarity, his dry wit informed by gentle self-mocking pedantry) but sometimes seems to miss the heart of the matter. For example, "Hombre de la esquina rosada," the title of the tale Borges called his "first outright short story," is translated literally by Hurley as "Man on Rose Corner."

This requires a long explanatory footnote describing the slums in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires, with their corner bars where Borges' beloved low-life knife-fighters hung out looking for trouble. As originally translated by di Giovani/Borges, the title was rendered simply as "Streetcorner Man," at once succinct, hard-boiled, noir -- capturing the essence of the tough compadrito.

Hurley eloquently justifies his linguistic decisions, citing 17 previous translators of Borges and referring to the master's own dictum that "every translation is a 'version' . . . one in a never-ending series." Each new version, per Hurley, is not a conquering correction of its predecessors but a "new voice given the old work, by the new life in a new land that the translation confers on it."

It might also be well to consider what Borges and di Giovani had to say concerning their own collaboration: "We have tried to make these stories read as though they had been written in English. . . . (English and Spanish) are two quite different ways of looking at the world, each with a nature of its own. . . . We have therefore shunned the dictionary as much as possible and have done our best to rethink every sentence in English words."

Alas, not even Borges himself had access to all of his work. Publishing rights denied him the chance to rethink the stories in "Ficciones," and several from "The Aleph" as well.

Comparing these first early translations (by Anthony Kerrigan and others) with Hurley's versions yields subtle differences in nuance, with neither risking the leaps Borges urged his own translator to take. Nevertheless, Hurley, with footnotes flying, jars the haunting "Funes the Memorious" (the tale of a crippled young man whose recollections encompass all the known universe) into "Funes, His Memory," perhaps the most discordant note in this fastidious translation.

Literary nitpicking is at its harshest when tiny flaws prevent the reader from appreciating overall accomplishment. Hurley deserves our enthusiastic praise for this monumental piece of work, which introduces Borges' final collection, "Shakespeare's Memory," into English for the first time. Among its four tales, "The Rose of Paracelsus" becomes an instant favorite, added to a long list of rediscovered landmarks on a wondrous safari back through Borges country.

Borges adroitly comments on his work in small introductions and afterwords here. These notes guide the reader from the author's earlier inventions -- those labyrinthine puzzles masked as literary essays -- to the late stories in "The Book of Sand" and "Brodie's Report," the latter "a set of modest experiments in straightforward storytelling" that the di Giovani/Borges translation called "Dr. Brodie's Report." "The Book of Sand," in particular, owes an acknowledged debt to Kipling's early tales, yet unmistakably resonates from the dream-laden imagination of Borges.

By reading many of the fictions in dual translations, mismatched twins, so alike yet utterly different, one feels akin to a character caught in a shadowy Borgesian fantasy, a man between mirrors, a figure lost in an M.C. Escher print forever treadmilling on a Mobius staircase.